The guy serving me in the chip shop on Friday caught a glimpse of my Lumia 800. “Good phone that.” he observed. “A mate’s got one. My iPhone is up for renewal soon and so I thought I’d get one as well”. Smooth move.

I really like my Lumia 800. The latest update has removed the only real issue I had with it, the battery life is now excellent. Of course, I’m selling mine now. On Saturday I went up town to not look at, and definitely not buy, the new Nokia 900. Which you can get in White at Phones4U. So I didn’t go in. And I didn’t look at it. And I definitely didn’t want one. But then…..

Having done all the maths and looked up the price on ebay of Lumia 800’s I concluded that if I sold my old iPhone (which I’ve been keeping for mainly sentimental reasons) and my Samsung Omnia 7 plus a few other bits and bobs I could run out even on the deal if I bought an unlocked device. Particularly as the chap in the shop uttered the magic phrase “It does tethering”. This means I can use the phone as a WIFI access point for any other devices that want to talk to the internets on the move. Tethering is promised for the Lumia 800, but my reasoning here is that it is not guaranteed that all carriers will enable it. However, if I have an unlocked device I can just turn it on and it will work. Which I have, and it does.

There is nothing wrong with my Lumia 800 at all. All the problems are with my eyes and fingers. I find the screen just a tiny bit too small to read easily and the keyboard is just a bit too tiny for my lanky fingers to find their way around. It is on eBay at the moment and I’ve had some expressions of interest already.

Changing phones was not too bad. Microsoft Exchange made sure that my address book moved over with no problem. All the pictures from the phone are already on Skydrive. The only real problem is that I’ve lost all my SMS conversations, but I can live with that. The Lumia 900 is properly lovely. I might even show it to the bloke in the chip shop.

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Rob Miles is a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Windows Phone MVP and Nokia Phone champ. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.